THE RAILWAY MAN IS A BIOPIC OF SOMEONE WHO DERAILS HIMSELF
With talk of “war crimes” from Rachel Maddow in anticipation of publication of the report on “enhanced interrogations,” there is talk that the phony torture scene in Zero Dark Thirty (2012) will be cut. But there will be no such call in The Railway Man, directed by Jonathan Keplitzky. The film is a biography of two persons, Eric Lomax (played by Jeremy Irvine as a soldier, Colin Firth as a middle aged man adult) and Takashi Nagase (played by Tanroh Ishida as a soldier, later by Hiroyuki Sanada). In 1942, when Japan took over Singapore, captured British soldiers were sent by rail to a prison camp in Thailand on the River Kwai. But The Railway Man is no remake of The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957). The Japanese expected them to commit harakiri honorably when the British colony was defeated, so they treated them as less than human upon arrival in the camp. One day Lomax is caught with a drawing of the railroad and a radio instrument, built to obtain information about the course of the war, so he is brought in for questioning. Nagase, the only prison camp official who can speak English, will not accept the explanation that he’s a nut about railroads and that the radio is a receiver that cannot broadcast. Nevertheless, Lomax is tortured: Filmviewers observe him pummeled thunderously, placed in a cage in the hot sun, and even waterboarded. When the Japanese are defeated, prison guards are rounded up for war crimes trials. Nagase saves himself by saying that he was only an interpreter. Meanwhile, Lomax returns to Britain, later marries Patti (Nicole Kidman), but is so haunted by the experience that she seeks out one of his fellow prison buddies, Finlay (Stellan Skarsgaard) to learn what, to her dismay, bothers Lomax. Finally, after that buddy commits suicide, evidently because of the pain of recollecting for Patti, Lomax decides to go back to the prison camp, which has become a museum, where he meets Nagase again, now as a tourist guide at the site. Although Lomax contemplates killing Nagase, he decides to interrogate him in the same nasty manner, only to learn that Nagase has remained at the prison museum to atone for what he realizes is his dishonorable past. [Spoiler alert: When Lomax learns that Nagase is a changed man, the two become friends, and Lomax returns to England to bring Patti with him to see the two hug after Nagase bows and sobs before Lomax.] Titles at the end inform that Nagase died in 2010, Lomax in 2011, and the book, The Railway Man (1995) by Lomax is the basis for the film. The Political Film Society has nominated The Railway Man as best film exposé, best film on human rights, and (in light of the ending) best film on peaceful conflict resolution of 2014. MH